The Temple Mount (Har Habayit, Haram esh-Sharif)is the holiest site for Judaism. The Jewish Temple in Jerusalem stood there: the First Temple (built c. 967 BC, destroyed c. 586 BC by the Babylonians), and the Second Temple (rebuilt c. 516 BC, destroyed in the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD).

Following the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70, the area of the Temple was deliberately left in ruins (first by the Romans, then by the Byzantines). This desecration was not redressed until the Muslim conquest of the city by the Caliph Omar ibn al-Khattab in 638. He ordered the clearing of the site and the building of a “house of prayer”.

Some 50 years later, the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik built the Dome of the Rock to enshrine the outcrop of bedrock believed to be the “place of the sacrifice” on Mount Moriah. He (or his son, the Caliph al-Walid I) also built the large mosque at the southern end of the Haram, which came to be called al-Aksa after the Koranic name attributed to the entire area.

Hulda Gates

A stairway in front of the north entrance to the al-Aksa Mosque leads down to a vaulted passageway and the walled-up Hulda Gates, which had been an entrance to the Temple Mount Platform at the time of the Herodian Second Temple.

Dome of the Rock

The Dome of the Rock stands on or near the approximate site of the Jewish Temple (most of the scholars today think the rock is the place of the Holy of Holies).

The Nimrod Fortress, Arabic: Qala’at al-Subeiba or Qala’at Namrud‎, “Castle of the Large Cliff”, is a medieval fortress situated in the northern Golan Heights, on a ridge rising about 800 m above sea level.

The fortress was built around 1229 by Al-Aziz Uthman, to preempt an attack on Damascus by participants of the Sixth Crusade.The fortress was further expanded to contain the whole ridge by 1230, and Baibars strengthened it and added larger towers after 1260. The fortress was given to Baibars’s second-in- command, Bilik. The new governor started the broad construction activities. When the construction was finished, Bilik memorialized his work and glorified the name of sultan in a 1275 inscription.

At the end of the 13th century, following the Muslim conquest of the port city of Akko (Acre) and the end of Crusader rule in the Holy Land, the fortress lost strategic value and fell into disrepair.

The Ottoman Turks conquered the land in 1517 and used the fortress as a luxury prison for Ottoman nobles who had been exiled to Palestine. The fortress was abandoned later in the 16th century and local shepherds and their flocks were the sole guests within its walls.